Linux and Scooby-Doo

One more on the ever-growing list of animated films using Linux opened this past weekend.

Scooby-Doo, the computer-generated dog in
the Warner Brothers film of the same name, was created using Linux.
Scooby-Doo was released on June 14, 2002 and
stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, from the popular TV show,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Live footage for the
film was shot in Australia, and the Scooby-Doo character was added
electronically later.

Film GIMP is the motion picture version of the popular
open-source GIMP image editing program.
Scooby-Doo was in production at the time I
visited the studio for my article, "Film GIMP at Rhythm &
Hues", which appeared in the March issue of Linux
Journal. Both a developer and a user of Film GIMP,
Rhythm & Hues keeps a few Windows and Mac OS X machines around,
mainly for compatibility with Adobe
Photoshop.

After the article appeared, some readers asked why Photoshop
is being used rather than the GIMP. Film GIMP developer Caroline
Dahllöf, a programmer at Rhythm & Hues, "Photoshop handles
more layers with big images better". Matte painting artists at
Rhythm & Hues create large backgrounds with perhaps forty
layers and use a lot of specialized plugins. Working on single
large images is quite different from the typical Film GIMP tasks of
retouching film frames to remove dust or wire rigs. To get rid of
Photoshop completely would require investing a lot of developer
resources.

"I really wish that there would be an official effort and
that I had more time to contribute", says Dahllöf. "Right now
we're really busy, but I hope to have more time for Film GIMP this
summer".

I myself am joining the project. The first things I want to
accomplish are updating the Film GIMP web site and providing a
source tarball so it isn't necessary to check out Film GIMP from
CVS.

Film GIMP development perhaps has a renewed urgency because
Apple recently acquired
not only Nothing Real's
Shake (see my May article in Linux
Journal, "Tippett Studio and Nothing Real's Shake") but
also Silicon Grail's
RAYZ. Film GIMP, Shake and RAYZ are the three available
Linux compositors; all the other Linux-based compositors are
proprietary, internal to the studios that developed them.

Steve Jobs reportedly visited motion picture studios months
back and took copious notes about to how best position Apple in the
motion picture business. Buying Shake brings Apple the leading
commercial film compositor, and in buying RAYZ, it has acquired the
most significant Linux challenger. Apple stated that they intend to
continue Linux support for at least one more version of Shake, but
users worry that Apple seems lukewarm in their support for Linux.
More Linux compositors, however, are on the horizon.

At the National Association
of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in April,
Discreet
showed their Combustion product ported to Linux, though not yet
released. Digital Domain says it may release NUKE, its proprietary
compositor that has won two Scientific and Technical Achievement
Academy Awards. ILM also has a highly regarded Linux compositor
called CompTime (described in my July
2002 Linux Journal article,
"Industrial Light & Magic"), but there are no plans to release
it. A source at Adobe says there also are no plans to port
After
Effects to Linux, but they did release Adobe Acrobat for
Linux in May without fanfare.

The Computers of Rhythm & Hues

Rhythm & Hues has 125 Linux desktops and 300 SGI
machines. Brown expects to complete the phasing out of SGI desktops
by the middle of 2003. "Those doing the heaviest work are using
Linux for performance", says Brown. "Productivity using Linux is
through the ceiling. Interactively, Linux is five to six times
faster than the SGI workstations being replaced".

"Our desktops are all dual-processor rackmounts, split 50-50
between P3s and Athlon MP 1800+", said Brown. Animator desktop
machines are remote rackmounts kept in the machine room, connected
with Cybex KVM extenders. Brown says that 3U racks were chosen to
avoid any weird AGP risers. The graphics cards are ATI FireGL 2.
"We're looking at FireGL 8800 Radeon cards", notes Brown, "but the
drivers are not ready yet." They like the FireGL 2 cards because of
the overlay planes (which work well with their software) and
because they are good at manipulating heavy, complex 3-D
geometries. Their machines use single monitors, not dual
head.

The renderfarm, where the individual motion picture frames
are computed, has 150 dual Pentium 1Ghz and 60 dual Athlon MP 1800+
machines. "AMD chips scream for our applications", says Brown. "I
can't tell you how impressed I am. An Athlon MP 1800+ gives about
the same performance as a 2.2G Pentium Xeon but at a third of the
price, if that." The render PCs all have separate IP addresses.
Rhythm & Hues uses its own custom queue for batch control,
which also uses the desktop machines as render nodes during their
idle cycles.

"We've ported our software and have all that running on
Linux", reports Brown. "We're using
Red Hat 7.2 and
XFree86 4.1. We use the
ATI OpenGL libraries, the SGI GLU libraries and the Mesa 3.4.2
GLUT."
Mesa
recommends the SGI GLU library version 1.3 over its own 1.2
implementation because SGI's is more up-to-date and reliable. Brown
created
scripts
to switch between various library permutations for testing and
benchmarking.

"Linux is stabilizing for us", says Brown. "For instance,
normal operations are fine, but the Thunder K7 Tyan AGP 4x
motherboard will wedge in our fire-hose tests". Brown says they
probably will switch to ASUS or Gigabyte motherboards. Blue Arc,
Network Appliance and a custom Sun box are the backend NFS servers.
"You just can't serve terabytes of data off a Linux box now",
states Brown. "Throughput is about a third of what it should
be".

Rhythm & Hues chose
Angstrom
for their rackmount PCs. "Angstrom does a good engineering job and
has a good team", says Brown. "They did well with the burn-ins, and
their prices are good. We get monster machines for $2,500. If I had
the money, I'd throw out every SGI now and get Athlons".

My name is Aria and I think your information about Scooby-Doo and Linux is fantastic! I've known Scooby sence I was two and I always read about him to know more about him. Now that I've seen this wonderfull pice of information it feels to me that I know almost everything about him,but I stil have a long way to go before I know everything about Scooby-Doo. I've heard "Scooby-Doo 2,Monsters Unleashed" is the second movie coming out March 2004,is that realy true?